Christian Petzold has for years been a titan of German cinema – and the Berlin film festival itself – and his new movie is an odd, quibbling tragicomedy with perhaps a little of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, avowedly intended as the second part of a trilogy about creativity and love (the first being Undine).
Afire is an approachable and digestible movie in some ways, and I liked the morose, hangdog look conjured by actor Thomas Schubert playing the miserable young writer Leon, who correctly suspects that his new novel, a zeitgeisty relationship comedy called Club Sandwich, is terrible. But in the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.
